Published: 21st June 2012

Apparently they've received a lot of praise for this,
and a quick Twitter search
reveals mostly positive comments.

Well let me add my voice to those who think this is
absolutely appalling. It's a
stupid and callous idea,
and I can only desperately hope it doesn't set a predecent.

So what's next — a tax on screenreaders perhaps, for the
extra time and effort involved in making sites accessible to them?
Perhaps a tax on people who don't have Flash installed, because it's
such a pain in the arse to sniff for that and design fallback behavior!

What about people on slow-to-update corporate network machines,
who have no choice over which browser they use. Will kogan perhaps offer
a rebate scheme for approved appeals?

What makes a "normal" site?

The real problem here is not the effort it takes
to support IE7.
The real problem here is false expectations.

Kogan's chief executive, Ruslan Kogan, complains about being
constantly on the line to my web team. Now I don't know
exactly what he was on the line about, I can only
infer that he means, to ask them why the site doesn't look the
same in IE7.

And there's the failure of expectation — the site
doesn't have to look the same in IE7.

The best websites are not ones that look the same
across a wide range of desktop browsers, they're the ones that
function the same irrespective
of which device was used to access them. And if his development
team have any professional experience at all, they'll know that
it's no harder to provide base-line functionality to IE7
than to any other browser, even the latest-greatest-build.

So either Mr Kogan's expectations are wrong, or his development team
have no idea what they're doing.

Now go to your room!

I wouldn't be so churlish as to hope for the imposition of this tax
to end up costing them more in lost business than was ever spent
on hacking IE7. But I do hope that plenty of people, like me,
speak out against this abomination.

This pitiful, unprofessional decision, that spits in the eye of accessibility
and rides roughshod over user choice.

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